Taito Paid Students 180,000 Yen to Show Games and Kept No Code
An unfinished PET experiment and a modern reconstruction show how much gaming history disappears between a demonstration and a store shelf.
By Chris PirilloRead the story
From the vault This day in tech history, November 3
- 1937
Howard Aiken writes to IBM
His proposal became the Harvard Mark I, which was 51 feet long and weighed about five tons.
- 1957
Laika goes up on Sputnik 2
She was a stray first named Kudryavka, Little Curly. The dogs considered had to be female, which made them easier to rig up, and brightly colored, so the video footage would be clearer.
- 1971
The first Unix Programmer's Manual
It had no pipes and no grep, and counted time in sixtieths of a second since January 1, 1971. Its own BUGS note said the counter would run out in "only about 2.5 years."
- 2017
Video Game History: Call of Duty: WWII comes out
Activision's return to World War II, with a campaign that storms Omaha Beach on D-Day, made $500 million in three days. That beat the opening weekends of Thor: Ragnarok and Wonder Woman combined.
Then and now
1980: A gigabyte of hard drive space: about $300,000. Today: about 3.5 cents. Seagate's 5 MB ST-506 sold for $1,500; its 8 TB BarraCuda is $279.99 on Seagate's store, October 2026.
